well i'm going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture as the fiscal cliff deadline looms large can progress as in congress protect the millions of jobless americans but also for seeing the wealthy elite to pay their fair share in taxes will ask incoming congressman alan grayson florida's ninth congressional district also the reporters out revealing the sea levels around the world are rising faster than previously thought after a point in a climate change denier to a top committee in congress are republicans still planning to ignore the obvious and later in the show we'll have a your take my take a live segment your chance to call in and ask a question or make

a comment live on the air. you need to know this the so-called fiscal cliff nears which means it's time for republicans to take some hostages there were signs earlier this week that republicans may be willing to cave in on the bush tax cuts for the rich when congressman tom cole called on his party his republican party to take president obama's deal and extend tax cuts for ninety eight percent of americans while letting them expire for the top two percent. that deal was nixed by speaker john boehner almost as soon as it was offered ultimately republicans are against the wall whether they like it or not the bush tax cuts are expiring at the end of the year now the only question left is what will republicans attempt to take. you for these tax cuts expire it could be extended unemployment benefits for more than two million americans which are set to expire at the end of the year as well and if

republicans tie up these benefits and also be standing in the way of hundreds of thousands of jobs being created at least that's the conclusion of a new report by the. nonpartisan congressional budget office c.d.o. estimates the just the simple act of extending unemployment benefits beyond the end of the year will provide much needed relief to two point one million jobless americans and it will also create three hundred thousand jobs after all that's how economics works americans their money in their pockets to spend that spending creates jobs consumers of the ultimate job creators conversely the c.b. overs released a report earlier this year concluding that there is absolutely no evidence that low tax rates on the rich lead to job creation that report of course was muzzled by republicans in congress which means we should expect republicans to muzzle this new report as well since it doesn't jive with their to do trickle down economic theories so our progress is ready for this upcoming fight and they can succeed in protecting millions of jobless americans while at the same time forcing the rich to

pay their fair share again let's ask incoming congressman alan grayson representing florida's ninth district congressman while go back to washington d.c. thank you great to have you here it is great to have you back in office we have missed your passion we have missed having a congressman with guts thank you but honestly i come back and i see nothing has changed seriously seriously we still have tax rates for the rich and what's different now and we still have republicans go on don't let's so what do you propose we do well i think what the democratic party wants to do what the president wants to do is what common sense tells you to do in this circumstance we still have a aggregate demand problem this country we have a fourteen billion dollar economy with thirteen trillion dollars sorry fourteen trillion dollar economy with thirteen trillion dollars of our good to men and the government keeps having to make up the difference so we have to put money into the pockets of people we're going to spend it now the democrats proposed by extending unemployment insurance helping the people who are really at the people who might be living in their cars otherwise you want to increase infrastructure spending we want

to extend tax breaks for the middle class and whether republicans keep on wanting do they want to keep on extending ten. breaks for the rich even though it hasn't created jobs it's not going to create jobs all it does is it helps to pay back the people who give them their campaign contributions every two years right speaking of whom you know frank luntz calls them the job creators there's this group of eighty or so of these c.e.o.'s that are doing a dog and pony show they're going to start running all these ads this in this next week about how they want to see a balanced approach you know that if we're going to raise taxes on the rich that's ok but you know we got to cut spending social spec they also want to make sure the offshore operations of their transnational corporations pay no taxes whatsoever i mean there's all these little gotchas imbedded in this how is it that that americans and particularly republican average working americans continue to buy this stuff when thirty two years of reaganomics has shown it to be just you know utter nonsense well look back of the last ten years since these tax breaks were

enacted what's happened is that there are twenty seven million more americans since the tax breaks were enacted for the rich and one million fewer private sector jobs the last time i looked which was a few months ago and now at this point you might actually be even but think about that twenty seven million more consumers no more private sector jobs it just hasn't worked and einstein said if you keep doing the same experiment over and over and over again and you expect a different result that means you're crazy right and this is well there's a false equivalence to here this being promoted by both republicans and frankly a lot of the media which is that if you raise taxes on rich people and let's stipulate a first of all they're talking about earned income not capital gains which sell most really rich people make their money and and secondly we're talking about raising them up to like thirty nine point six percent when you know during the real boom years of america it was at ninety one to seventy four percent the top tax rate

so it's but anyhow they say we're going to raise taxes on rich people had to cut spending on poor people. how can that be a fall how can that be. i don't see the balance that this is to me let's start with the first part of that equation how about this revolutionary concept a dollar is a dollar why is it that when ordinary people make ordinary income they have to pay up to thirty six percent of the government and written mitt romney pays fourteen percent why is that how do we allow that because he's the divinely anointed venture capital guy you know vulture capital i'm not that old but i'll tell you that when i was growing up we made a distinction between earned income and unearned income and under an income as capital gains interest dividends and that money was taxed at a higher rate than ordinary and now we taxed at a lower rate and what good has it done can anybody point to any benefit to the economy for having done that for having made that major change you know going all the way back to adam smith who literally wrote the book on capitalism adam smith said that taxation should be in proportion to what you can afford to pay that was

over two hundred years ago have we forgotten that yeah well and ronald reagan actually had in eighty seven i believe it was had for one year had both the earned income and the unearned income or the capital gains rate both the twenty eight percent and famously said to a group of people get the paper out or someplace you know should a millionaire pay a lower tax rate than a bus driver i don't think so that's crazy yes but the modern day republican party of the twenty first century republican party that wants to lead us back to the eighteenth century they're the ones who think that somehow or other ronald reagan was wrong and that rich people should pay less than poor people one taxes even though they have a vastly greater ability to pay that's incorrect i'm told we have the reagan clip i'll just lay riff off this here it is. it's a letter from a man out here in the country an executive loser earning him six figures well above one hundred thousand dollars a year. he wrote me in support of the tax plan because he said

i am legally able to take advantage of the present tax code nothing dishonest doing what the law prescribes and wind up paying a smaller salary than my secretary gets. or get i mean paying a smaller start paying a smaller tax than my secretary paige. what we do with yeah yeah listen if a dollar a dollar and we're taxed accordingly and you do that for the so security system and all dollars were taxed equally out of the social security system so security would be solvent forever and if your dollar were a dollar of the medicare system medicare would be solvent for ever and if a dollar a dollar under the income tax system and that includes corporate dollars we'd be very close to a balanced budget so what's wrong with that idea makes perfect sense to me the conundrum is how do you convey that to the american people after all these years of indoctrination i mean it's amazing i'm on my radio show you know we take calls and

i get these you know red state republicans you know people making twenty five thirty thousand dollars a year sharpening chainsaws call and of course you can't raise the taxes on rich people it's going to do away with our jobs i heard it on sean hannity you know it's just what do we see. the same dollars dollar eight dollars a dollar and i think they can understand i think everyone can understand they need to understand that otherwise american politics becomes tribal if you're right out of congress how do how should this congress be dealing with republican control when you were in congress i believe you were in congress during the during the period of time when the democrats actually controlled the house of representatives so it's a very different congress now what you have to make them fear the consequences of their interactions we haven't done that you know for the past four years we've had a leadership that says two of them always no matter what position they take they say have half and. think history has shown for the past four years that doesn't work you have to show them that if they are stubborn and if they do try to shut

down the government and if they do try to prevent progress in america they'll have to pay for it they'll lose their offices not be paid for it positively the way they were two years ago but paid for they'll have to pay for it by by defeat at the ballot box and hopefully they can you know it can be it can play out the way i do with this this is so important i remember from the first debate between the president and that ron the where the president said at one particular moment he said you know there's really not much of a difference between myself and mitt romney on social security or on medicare and i think people recognize that the president lost that debate and possibly could have lost the entire campaign there is a difference we're democrats we created so security we created medicare we're the ones who you can count on to defend these programs and these benefits while other republicans going all the way back to herbert hoover have tried to destroy them so it has to be you know i would ask you that position the black friday strike you took part of this you showed up at

a wal-mart. twice both thanksgiving night and on friday which was black friday on thanksgiving night because we knew that there were a lot of workers they were working on thanksgiving away from their families and had no choice because wal-mart doesn't give you days off that wal-mart doesn't give that kind of paid vacation and they make eight dollars and eighty two cents an hour on the average we went to wal-mart wal-mart in my district in orlando and we gave them dinner we gave them pack a bag of brown paper bag inside was a turkey sandwich because it was thanksgiving and a bag of chips because everybody deserves a snack and a letter explaining their rights organize and that was considered a crime by wal-mart they well not a crime but they weren't happy and they asked us to leave so we left home so that in the mean time we showed the workers two things first of all the information that letter conveyed to them what their rights are wal-mart tries to keep from the dark and intimidate those workers who do exercise their rights in orlando they had a worker led out in handcuffs. recently well for exercising his rights and secondly

we show them that they're not alone you know if a congressman shows up and says i care enough about you to be here on thanksgiving with you instead of my own family i think that convey something important it does conveys a a lot that's very important and and i really honor you for doing that thank you we have just thirty seconds left to this there was a walkout today in new york city. at a number of fast food franchises fast and c.e.o.'s averaging twenty five thousand dollars a day in income the workers making eight bucks an hour at wal-mart every single person from the lowest associate making minimum wage and there are hundreds of thousands of them all the way up the c.e.o. could get a thirty percent raise and wal-mart would still be profitable that's how much they abuse their own workers that is absolutely incredible congressman alan grayson thanks so much for being with us tonight thank you it's great to have you with us. well director.

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screwed news our planet is warming the seas are rising faster than we previously thought researchers in the u.s. germany and france have found that sea levels around the world are rising at a much faster clip it was previously projected by the united nations the research was published this week in the journal environmental research letters is the nation barrels toward an environmental catastrophe republicans are intransigent and have appointed congressman lamar smith an outspoken denier of manmade climate change to head up the house science and technology committee which has oversight over our climate change policy meanwhile president obama's e.p.a. is taking steps to mitigate future climate disasters on thursday the environmental

protection agency announced that it is barring oil giant b.p. from receiving any new federal government contracts due to that foreign oil corporations quote lack of business integrity and quote following the two thousand and ten gulf oil spill b.p. recently agreed to pay four and a half billion dollars in fines for the environmental catastrophe which will only put a slight dent in their corporate money chest but this latest move by the e.p.a. could be far more harmful to the company b.p. can still benefit from existing federal contracts but the department of interior has also banned b.p. from receiving any new leases to drill on federal lands according to the e.p.a. the ban on b.p. will last until the company can prove it's capable of meeting federal business standards but can any oil company prove that it's operating in the best interest of the community now the planet is getting hotter and hotter faster and faster or republicans or will republicans continue just play politics and give big oil cover says my pop cap and tonio attorney and host of ring of fire radio mike welcome back

. craig great to have you with us more than ninety nine percent of all peer reviewed studies. on climate change of firm that it's apennine and that were helping cause yet republicans appoint a climate change denier to head up the house science committee what's your take oh well tom my take is in three weeks i'm going to be in antarctica where a section of the southern polar cap the size of new york is breaking away from that from that pole the same way that we saw in eyes in greenland an entire ice island break away two years ago that was the size of manhattan while that cabot what that catastrophe is taking place we have the republicans putting into office there guys lamar smith from texas now look you don't have to dig deep at all to understand who lamar smith is this is a guy who got seven hundred thousand dollars from the energy industry and they only

asked get a little more to do one thing and that is to be the mouthpiece for the energy industry so what he's done is he's been the mouthpiece out telling the american public in telling the media a there's no such thing as global climate change that's where he started off and then he morphed into the fact well if there is something called global climate change it wasn't caused by fossil fuel and tom i think what's so upset about lamar smith being in that position he is the key guy in the science committee for the house of representatives in the greatest power in this country the united states of america now he's the same guy this political hack who's telling people who live through sandy people who survived the western drought fires people who survive three hundred fifty tornadoes over a two month period of time last year he's the republican telling them that you know what you sound ridiculous when you talk about climate change you sound like a ridiculous global alarmist that's the man the republicans chose to put in charge

of science in america today but don't republicans also have kids who are going to have to grow up in a hotter and more volatile and thus far more hostile to human life planet. they don't seem to care we've heard that argument so many times that used to be an argument that we would pay attention to and that is as you sit in that chamber and mr smith as you take seven hundred thousand dollars from an industry that you know is corrupt an industry that you're taking money from that you they clearly understand at this point just like bill mckibben has done great work on this he says look what do we know about the industry now we know they know the climate change is real and that in and if we don't do something now then we for generations to come we've destroyed the planet that's criminal tom that's not just negligent that's criminal so tom smith so excuse me representative smith has has agreed

basically to do business with criminals for the right price so children don't seem to matter the next generation doesn't seem to matter what with a character like smith well this is this is sort of like the tobacco industry knowing since the forty's maybe the thirty's that their product was killing people and yet funding phony science to cover that up for decades i believe you were part of the group that brought them down on this is there or is there any way to demonstrate the criminality of this behavior well they during the tobacco years they they developed a concept called you can't know in we can't know in that is we need more studies nobody can be sure that cigarettes are killing you through cancer and heart disease the we've seen the documents where the oil industry has used the same madison avenue types to take that same argument and delay the inevitable now for almost

thirty years for almost thirty years they've known that there's such a thing called climate change and they've tried to create doubt by hiring bias to toots in sin universities all over the country approached. messrs who are willing to sell their decency willing to willing to sell their credibility and for one hundred thousand dollars write a paper deliver it to the oil industry and say there's no such thing as global climate change we saw it with tobacco rich seen it with the oil industry now for about thirty years and it's been very effective is this a classic case that we're we're watching played right in front of us here pappa of companies internalizing profits and the oil companies are taking all this money and extra analyzing costs of both you know they use our military to protect their shipping lanes and things like that we all pay for that with our tax dollars but the biggest cause to seems like is the destruction of the planet itself they're

paying none of that. they simply they simply shift all the ugly things over to taxpayers while they take the profits look at the model that we have and i'd love to say that obama has been good on this he really hasn't i've been talking about republicans but he really hasn't been all that great on this issue when we heard him come into office the first time we heard these lofty ideas about how he was going to rid us of our oil addiction and then when we look back we found that nothing happened all we found is that china is spending sixty billion dollars in the next ten years to try to do something about it hell the saudi arabians in the mideast have spent six billion dollars in the last few years trying to come up with alternative energy what the same time ninety percent tom of our internet ninety percent of our energy used in this country for the next ten years will be fossil fuel because we haven't seen this administration do anything now we'd like to say

that there's been something meaningful but there hasn't been and this is something we have to hold the republican republicans and the democrats accountable for listen this week the u.n. climate chief got it right when he said he was there when he when he said that the u.s. . yes will show up in qatar next week on the climate council meeting and they won't do anything meaningful that's what the u.n. climate chief basically said he said the u.s. has fallen behind on climate on climate technology on alternative energy technology and we don't seem to be willing to rid ourselves of our oil addiction you know what do you make of the e.p.a.'s decision of block b.p. from federal contracts and a part of the interior is this this is more about being a bad corporate citizen than it is about global warming is and. i think the e.p.a. is decision here tom will be will be very short lived already you see b.p. going in spending the lobby money putting the lobby pressure on the e.p.a. and i don't really see much happening nothing happens until a corporation like b.p.

gets what they call the death penalty and that is look we can't trust you you've killed people you've destroyed an entire ecosystem and you haven't done it just once b.p. you are a repeat offender and at some point a reef a repeat offender has to be treated just like any other repeat offender in this situation you have to say we are removing your ability to be able to do business in the united states they had the ability to do that we passed on that opportunity and you know what it would have cost to saddam because the people working for b.p. would have simply moved over to more responsible companies but instead we continue the same methodology we build oil refineries we go to saudi arabia bal down the sheet to the dictators the sheik dictators who are hated by their own people those chic dictators despise democracy we ship their oil across the the atlantic very expensively with military escorts periodically we go to war to support our oil our

oil our oil industry and it destroys our planet in the process it's amazing mike papen tonio thanks so much thank you. as. it's the good the bad in the very very murky keisha's slee ugly the good senator dianne feinstein senator feinstein commissioned a report that was released by the government accountability office recently which says that the us has more than enough prison space to how's the one hundred sixty six prisoners who are currently held at guantanamo bay or in other words time to close gitmo after the report was released senator feinstein said this report demonstrates that if the political will exists we could finally close guantanamo without imperiling our national security. more lawmakers joined forces with senator feinstein and forced closure of get mode once and for all the bad senator mike lee

mike huckabee these radio show yesterday lee argued that raising taxes on the wealthy elite america would inevitably hurt the poor in our country referring to raising taxes on the rich we worry about the consequences that will inevitably result from that action and it will hit the poorest among us the hard. argument that raising taxes on the wealthy is going to hurt the poor has become a popular talking boy from conservatives but it's nonsense just another way they're trying to keep their wallets full and avoid doing their fair share to help america's economy grow and the very very ugly sean hannity if you call out fox so-called news enough like we do on this program you better be prepared for them to fire back at you even with a real dud stud hannity featured a rant i did i radio program on his new liberal hate speech segment take a look. for those of us that that now realize barack obama owns the economy owns

the deficit he owns everything and as things get worse you can blame him for his failed policies but if they're going to go back in this case thom hartmann is going to blame ronald reagan. but there's never any hope of nominal you george. so this. black friday in reality is a symptom of the plight the thirty years of reaganomics has brought to working people in america and right along with the frenzied rise of shoppers willing to fight each other in retail outlets across america we've been steadily for the last thirty years watching the destruction of organized labor of labor unions we have black friday today because the wealthy elite have strangled their workers for thirty two years ever since ronald reagan's election yet those eight years of clinton and four years of obama didn't count it's reagan's fault that black friday people are killing themselves at victoria's secret for a shot if you're going to attack me as a portion of my program in the process at least get that they way that rant was

from nov twenty sixth not the twenty seventh but more importantly do you really think that the decline of the american middle class is a laughing matter if you really think that millions of americans struggling to survive as they live paycheck to paycheck is a joke if you do it's just very fair. coming up the phone lines are now open for our your take my take a live segment so if you want the chance to ask me a question live on the big picture give us a call it to a tune i know for twenty one thirty four talking to you after the break.

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